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great writeup and tutorial. you might mention though that you can do color grading with the exclusion and difference blend modes. IF you add say a blue fill layer and set the blend mode to exclusion, then because of how the math works, you will get blue in the shadows and yellow in the highlights. Color grading results when you reduce the opacity of the color fill layer.. to your desired layer.. Difference works similarly

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Hi dmstraker,
I’ve been intrigued with luminosity masks as applied with Blend Ranges in Affinity Photo. I’ve had some discussions with smadell before locating your work recently on these Forums.
Thank you for sharing your findings and macros. The curves you provide, including the multiple additions of the 5-curves, were a good addition.
Your 5-Stage Curve Previews macros have been most helpful to me. I noticed that the previews are like the Toggle Quick Mask in the Toolbar, using White as Mask. But as I went from Blacks to Shadows to Mid-tones to Highlights and finally Whites, I found by the time I got to Whites I could not see any of the selected pixels. My screen was completely white. There are pixels selected, but what I needed was the Quick Mask Black as Mask.

To better illustrate this, I’ve included a screen grab first from Highlights, then Whites. Finally I show the screen grab from Whites as viewed from Black as Mask.
Here are screen grabs from Highlight and Whites from a your macros, followed by pictures from Whites, in Black as Mask mode (which I obtained from the Hack below):
[Highlights-Preview-dmstraker.jpg]
Screen Grab Highlights Preview
[Whites-Preview-dmstraker.jpg]
Screen Grab Whites Preview (yes, it’s all white)
[untitled-.jpg]
Screen Grab Whites (Black as Mask) from Toggle Quickmask

My Hack, or workaround, was to go to /Select/Selection from Layer/ [Shift-Cmnd-O] and then select the Toggle Quick Mask from the Toolbar, and finally pick Black as Mask from the drop down.
In general I’ve found that when viewing the lighter luminosity masks, Black as Mask works better, and with the darker luminosity masks, White as Mask works better.
I’ve played with the macros to create the “semi-macro” Hack:
Set Blend Ranges
Selection from Layer

...and only then, after the macro finishes, manually picking
Toggle Quick Mask...manually having to select the correct mask (Black as Mask, White as Mask, or any other that best shows the pixels selected by the luminosity mask).

Might you have a better way to do this? Or to program the macros so that the “lighter” macros have Dark as Mask, while the “darker” macros have Light as mask?